The System: The Glory and Scandal of Big-Time College Football (14 page)

Bennett started yelling, telling everyone to get out of his room and clean up the mess. There were used condoms on the floor. In the commotion, Brown wobbled out of the room and across the hall to the bathroom. She locked herself in and leaned over the tub, trying to gag herself. Her top was pulled down below her breasts. The rest of her clothes were missing.

Minutes later Bennett rapped on the door and insisted she open it. She did and he tossed her jeans at her. “Get dressed,” he said.

A few minutes later Bennett led her out of the bathroom to the outside balcony. She promptly threw up. Using Brown’s cell phone, Bennett finally tracked down Smith, who had experienced car trouble. He grabbed a couple buddies and drove Brown to the parking lot where Smith was stranded.

The moment Smith saw Brown she knew something had gone terribly wrong. Brown was crying and looked pale. While Bennett and his friends looked at Smith’s car, she comforted Brown.

“You shouldn’t have left me,” Brown whispered.

“What happened?”

“They raped me.”

Smith looked toward Bennett. Then she looked at his friends.

“They raped you or he raped you?”

“They raped me.”

Scarcely a year goes by without one or more college football programs being rocked by sexual assault charges. In 2012, players at five BCS schools were charged with sex crimes, and two Texas players—Case McCoy and Jordan Hicks—were sent home before the Alamo Bowl when a woman told San Antonio police that she had been sexually assaulted. Both players were indefinitely suspended. But they proclaimed their innocence, and neither was charged with a crime.

This problem is not new. Nebraska’s back-to-back national championship teams in 1994 and 1995 were tarnished by repeated police reports detailing violence against women. In the midst of the championship run, the Cornhuskers’ top lineman pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting Miss
Nebraska, a fellow student. In 2002, four Notre Dame football players were accused of gang rape. One of them pleaded guilty to sexual battery; the other three were exonerated. In the past decade, Penn State, Wisconsin, Kansas State, Arizona, Miami, USC and Iowa were just some of the programs that faced publicized allegations of sexual abuse by players. Things got so out of hand at the University of Montana that it had to conduct its own investigation into nine sexual assaults by football players between September 2010 and December 2011.

But those are just the cases that make the news. Most incidents of sexual assault involving college football players never see the light of day. As a general rule, sex crimes are widely underreported. Even fewer of them are prosecuted. That’s especially true when the accused are athletes. A comprehensive national study on the prevalence of sexual assault among male student-athletes sheds some light on this. The study—the only one of its kind—was done in the mid-1990s. Researchers targeted Division I colleges and universities with top twenty football and basketball programs to provide the following information:

total number of male students enrolled

total number of male student-athletes enrolled

total number of sexual assaults reported

total number of reported sexual assaults involving a student-athlete

Thirty institutions participated in the study. Information was gathered from twenty campus police departments and ten judicial affairs offices. In all, 107 cases of sexual assault were examined. The primary finding was that male student-athletes made up just 3 percent of the male student population yet were responsible for more than 19 percent of the reported sexual assaults on campus. Very few of these cases were publicly reported.

Subsequent research has suggested a range of factors contributing to why some athletes are more prone to abuse women, from a sense of entitlement to a higher frequency of casual sex with multiple partners to a warped sense of women as sexual prey. But the biggest factor may boil down to opportunity or access.

In the case of college football, there is no denying that just about everyone on campus is in awe of the young men who wear the uniform and fill the stadium on Saturday afternoons, including plenty of beautiful girls. The fact that some girls want to be seen with a football player does not, of course, necessarily mean they want to have sex with a football player.
But the lion’s share of sexual assault cases against college football players—and athletes in general—usually involve a victim who willingly goes to an athlete’s turf—his dorm room, apartment or hotel—and later claims that something happened that she didn’t sign up for. In almost every instance, the accused player admits to sexual contact and claims it was consensual. It sets up the classic she-said-he-said scenario with a unique twist—when athletes are involved it is often she-said-they-said.

These cases usually come down to the freshness of the complaint, the strength of the physical evidence and, most important, the credibility of the accuser.

Detective DeVon Jensen is an investigator in the Special Victims Unit for the Provo Police Department. It was 5:30 p.m. on Monday when a desk sergeant notified him that a young girl, her parents and a cousin were in the waiting area. They wanted to file a rape report stemming from an incident the previous night. Jensen buzzed them in.

Through tears Brown gave a detailed account of what had happened in apartment 124 eighteen hours earlier. But she was pretty sketchy on names. She identified Bennett as the one she had gone to see and the one who had escorted her out afterward. She was pretty sure he had not assaulted her. She claimed his roommate, B. J. Mathis, had assaulted her. She only knew the faces of the others.

Jensen contacted BYU campus police and requested head shots of the African-American football players. He told Brown she could return the next day to ID them. He also took Smith’s statement. She said that Brown had been pressured to drink and that porn scenes she had viewed mirrored the acts later performed on Brown. She also helped identify a couple more players. Jensen completed his report and called the hospital.

Dr. Sandra Garrard, a physician at a family practice clinic, performed an examination of Brown. Experienced in handling sexual assault victims, Garrard began by asking Brown about her medical history, noting the various medications she took—Paxil for depression; trazodone for sleeping; and Ortho Tri-Cyclen for irregular menstruation. Then Garrard went head to toe, documenting outward signs of trauma—abrasions on the left breast, a bruise on the right thumb, and tenderness along her neck and around her navel. She also noted two small lacerations on the outer area of the vagina.

The rape kit results were on Detective Jensen’s desk by Tuesday morning, August 10. Across town, Gary Crowton and his team were in a meeting
with Athletic Director Val Hale. It was the first day of fall camp, and Hale was lecturing the players about the honor code and the need to avoid trouble. He specifically warned the team against getting into compromised situations with girls that might lead to allegations of sexual assault. While that went on, Detective Jensen and two partners executed a search warrant at the apartment belonging to Bennett and Mathis. They immediately detected a strong chemical odor—cleaning solution of some sort. The place was spotless. Even the trash cans were empty. It was as if a maid service had just been through.

The first bedroom—Mathis’s—was the one room in the apartment that Brown had not entered. It was also the only room that wasn’t cleaned up. The officers gathered up the bedsheets and dusted the desk for fingerprints. There were dozens.

Bennett’s room was a different story. It was immaculately clean. Even the desk was spotless—literally. When Jensen swept it for fingerprints, he found none. The surface had been wiped clean with bleach. They collected Bennett’s sheets, a couple washcloths containing semen residue and a box of condoms found in his duffel bag. But there was no sign of alcohol—no empty bottles or plastic cups—anywhere in the unit. The officers checked the dumpster out back, but it had been emptied the previous day. Jensen did, however, find a pornographic DVD left on top of the living room television. He seized it as evidence.

At precisely 3:35 that afternoon, Gary Crowton started a meeting with his quarterbacks. Then there was a knock at the door. It was tight ends coach Mike Empey. “We have an issue,” he said.

Crowton stepped out.

Empey, who was also the recruiting coordinator and oversaw housing for freshmen players, informed him that one of the apartment managers had just been by. He had reported that the police had just searched one of his units—number 124. They were investigating a sexual assault that allegedly took place Sunday night. They were also looking for evidence of alcohol consumption.

“Who’s in that room?” Crowton asked.

Empey told him.

Crowton wanted both players in his office immediately.

Minutes later Bennett and Mathis showed up.

“Was there alcohol and a sexual situation in your room on Sunday night?” Crowton asked them.

Both players acted surprised. “No,” they told him.

“Was there any kind of party at that house?” Crowton asked.

They told him there had been a Madden Football party.

“Was there any alcohol?”

“Coach, there was no alcohol,” one of them said. The other agreed.

“Was there any sexual nature of any kind?”

They told him there was a girl present but insisted there had been no sexual contact whatsoever.

“I want you to go down to the police department and tell them your story,” Crowton said.

Bennett and Mathis started talking over each other.

“Stop,” Crowton said. “Just go tell the police your story.”

He yelled for his secretary, gave her his car keys and told her to drive the boys to the station. The minute they left, Crowton rushed back to his quarterbacks meeting. By the time he got back to his office, his secretary had returned from the police station. She handed Crowton his keys and directed his attention to some paperwork that Bennett and Mathis had brought back—a copy of the warrant and an inventory of what was collected during the search.

Crowton scanned the evidence list for alcohol and found none. But he noticed that a pornographic DVD and condoms had been found. Not a good sign. The two players were waiting outside his office. He called them in and asked them how things had gone at the station.

They said they had told the police the same things they had told him: there had been no alcohol and no sex. Crowton asked them about the DVD. They said it belonged to someone else, and they denied watching it. They had an answer for the condoms, too. “Both of them explained that their mothers had given them condoms since they were fourteen years old because of all the teenage pregnancies in Texas,” Crowton said. “Their parents wanted them to always have a condom with them.”

Crowton took them at their word. Still, a criminal investigation was under way. He followed the protocol and telephoned Val Hale the minute Bennett and Mathis left his office.

Hale was in Crowton’s office minutes later. They got on the speaker-phone with Steve Baker, the director of BYU’s Honor Code Office. After getting up to speed, Baker gave Crowton some simple advice:
Don’t say or do anything that can hurt the investigation
.

Next, Hale called the university’s vice president, Fred Skousen, who subsequently notified the president. Late that night, Hale called Crowton at home with word from the top. “The athletic director told me that the
president and vice president said … if these kids did anything, we need to get rid of these guys,” Crowton said.

At that point, all Crowton knew was that an investigation was under way. The players were denying everything, none of them had been charged, and the Provo police were not talking. They weren’t releasing any reports, either. The university was in the dark. So were the local media.